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This communication was stimulated by Stanley Weiss's (1987) article in this journal, "The Two-Woman Phenomenon," that dealt with a type of object choice in which a man forms stable relationships with two women simultaneously. He emphasized that this "clinical picture needs to be differentiated from the many other situations in which a man is involved with two women at the same time" (p. 272). In describing patients of this type, Weiss added a new category to Freud's "extreme and sharply defined" types of men who make particular object choices (Freud, 1910, 1912). Weiss issued an invitation in his last paragraph:
I believe that a two-man phenomenon, the female counterpart of the two-woman phenomenon, is to be found in certain female patients and is also more common than is generally acknowledged. It is hoped that this communication will stimulate other analysts and investigators to share their findings and help us expand our knowledge about this clinical entity (p. 285).
My experience over the last twenty years strongly confirms Weiss's suggestion, and I believe that the phenomenon is sufficiently common to be familiar not only to analysts, but to others as well. I will describe two such patients whom I saw in psychoanalysis and will mention three others I treated more briefly. It is clear, as with Weiss's cases, that the individuals "do not fall into any one diagnostic category" (p. 284) and that the patients' dynamics are specific in each case. Certain phenomenological features, however, are strikingly similar to those described by Weiss. These women all marry young, choosing men from their